Which Desktop / Window Manager is most secure?

I use KDE. Some use GNOME. Most other options are probably to be left out as X11 is unsafe.

Cosmic is not nearly finished, but will probably be a bit safer, as its in rust, even though not tested.

Then there are window managers like Sway, Hyprland, waymonad, wayfire, etc.

RaspberryPi also has their own Wayland Desktop.

Is every Wayland Desktop / WM equally safe, what are other variables here like language, features, control over permissions, etc?

corship,

You really should press Ctrl+alt+f3 on your lock screen and get your mind blown.

Pantherina,

That leaves the desktop running in a parallel session

corship, (edited )

I think you missed the point. Switch the tty to realize your de is irrelevant in regards to security, because you don’t even need one…

Pantherina,

Wait until you want to watch a video, look at a photo, play a game or view a PDF lol

musicmatze,
@musicmatze@lemmy.ml avatar

You can do all these things on a framebuffer. Ok, maybe the game thing is a bit of a hassle, but the other stuff is totally doable.

corship,

What the duck has this to do with anything.

The entire point is that your DE has NO security features at all, those come ALL from the underlying system such as PAM for example, managing the authentication and such.

These stupid strawmans “huhr dur watch a video”

Besides that I’ll just answer the straw man argument anyway because it’s even stupid if you take it seriously YES YOU CAN ACTUALLY LAUNCH GUI (such as a game) DIRECTLY FROM TTY.

And I quote

LoL

Pantherina,

Learned something, thanks

sibloure,

I would love to only use the computer in tty but would be hard to edit images in GIMP. Or do you still launch GUI apps directly from tty? Most websites are an abomination viewed through lynx or similar.

corship,

What the duck has this to do with anything.

The entire point is that your DE has NO security features at all, those come ALL from the underlying system such as PAM for example, managing the authentication and such.

These stupid strawmans “huhr dur watch a video”

Besides that I’ll just answer the straw man argument anyway because it’s even stupid if you take it seriously YES YOU DO ACTUALLY LAUNCH GUI DIRECTLY FROM TTY.

sibloure,

Sorry I don’t understand what this means. I am not a computer whiz but just like the simplicity of typing things versus navigating menus.

possiblylinux127,

I don’t think security comes from your desktop

Pantherina,

Your desktop handles Wayland, Xwayland, preinstalled apps, file management, some services and GUI integration, networking, Printing, Bluetooth, GPS (if available), cell data (if available)… so I would say it does in part come from the Desktop.

The Desktop is software which needs resources, gives access, reads and writes data,…

For example SELinux Confined Users break KDE, but not GNOME afaik

possiblylinux127,

I don’t think it does. The services and apps are all broken down into smaller chunks so there isn’t going to be a clear desktop that’s better. I haven’t heard of any CVEs in KDE or gnome either so I’m not convinced that my desktop is a threat. For me the biggest threat is my web browser and physical security

Ramin_HAL9001,

This is not a very good question. If you are concerned about security you need to think about what specifically you are trying to keep safe? Here are some examples of different security scenarios:

  1. Do you want your computer to be safe when it is stolen?
  2. Do you want to run lots of native apps from untrusted sources?
  3. Do you want it to be used by many people and you don’t want them to be able to steal each others secrets?

Each one of those questions has different means of securing the computer. With question 1, it is not so much a matter of desktop environment, rather it has more to do with using full-disk encryption, setting a boot password in UEFI, and always having your lock screen enabled.

With question 2, this is a much more difficult task and you would probably be better off running apps in a VM, or carefully crafting your “Security Enhanced” Linux profile – or not using Linux at all, but using FreeBSD which allows you to run apps in jails.

With question 3, be more careful with filesystem permissions and access control lists, setup your sudoers file properly, and use a desktop environment with better security auditing like Gnome or KDE Plasma.

Pantherina,

Never heard of these jails, like bubblejail? Its available on Linux too.

I know the question is vague and highly dependend on Threat model etc. Pre-enabled services, distribution adding stuff to it, SELinux confined user (not working with Plasma at all), xwayland support for keylogging chosen keys (Plasma).

Also GTK is widely used for rust apps, this doesnt exist on Plasma at all, not a problem though as Plasma is not Gnome and simply supports GTK normally.

jman6495,

I don’t think the DE itself matters, but I can recommend using an immutable OS (makes it harder to install malware) and installing flatpak apps only. You can also use software like flatseal to further lock down permissions

lemmyvore,

I’m starting to think people misunderstand what an “immutable” distro really does…

jman6495,

Please do share with me what I do not understand.

A mostly read only filesystem built from a limited number of packages, with other files being in a fixed number of locations mean it is harder for malware to hide.

lemmyvore,

You can achieve the exact same thing with a normal distro if you mount /var and /boot separately of /. And if you get a root exploit it’s just as harmful on either approach.

“Immutable” systems are meant for maintainer comfort not for user security.

jman6495,

No, you can’t : in an immutable distro I can reasonably trace almost any file in the filesystem back to the package that created it, and know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the installed version of said file has not been tampered with. That isn’t possible an a normal distro.

lemmyvore,

Sure it is, has been for decades. You can use a read-only root partition, there are many tools to ensure the integrity of everything on it, and tracing files back to their package is a very old feature.

Pantherina,

Already doing that :D kinoite-main from ublue

mintycactus,
@mintycactus@lemmy.world avatar

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  • Pantherina,

    I dont get that scentence

    mintycactus,
    @mintycactus@lemmy.world avatar

    deleted_by_author

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  • Pantherina,

    No that is bluefin, their special distro.

    Ublue is like rpmfusion but for image-based. Its the addition to fedora, with packages they can’t ship. They replace all the libav* with complete ffmpeg which is pretty great as its a great tool and Firefox works ootb.

    For example they have -nvidia images for every image, which is the best way to use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers as you can roll back and a broken update simply wont ship to you.

    They also have modded kernel images for Razer, Surface and a special Framework image.

    Another cool project basing off their “starting point” toolkit to create custom images, is secureblue, a security-optimized Version including

    • hardened kernel and hardened_malloc
    • updated Chromium, maybe soon Brave
    • soon a hardened Chromium (currently as COPR “vanadium”) like GrapheneOS
    • hardened services, firewall
    • removed unused kernel modules

    It is very security focused though, so no Firefox, no Flatpak as its currently broken, Podman (distrobox, toolbox) is currently not working and its unclear if that is actually necessary, …

    Bluefin is their fancy distro with lots of Tools, a custom Desktop, integrated Developer packages and more.

    mintycactus,
    @mintycactus@lemmy.world avatar

    deleted_by_author

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  • Pantherina,

    For firefox AND video thumbnails and preview to work you can just add libavcodec-freeworld. But full ffmpeg is so much better.

    jman6495,

    Very good choice :D

    Nibodhika,

    If you’re going to be that level of paranoid might as well not have graphical interface at all.

    PoisonedPrisonPanda,

    As others said, depends on the definition.

    I throw Tails into the ring.

    Having a non-persistent system makes it safe in some way.

    Paragone,

    IF by “security” one means bugs have been prevented from living in it, there is one coded in Haskell, it may be named XMonad or something…

    ( … digging … )

    Yep:

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad

    from there:

    “Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]”

    Dig: 2000-ish lines of code.

    xmonad.org

    xmonad.org/documentation.html

    chaorace, (edited )
    @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

    Wayland is Wayland. If you use a Wayland compositor, you’re getting a lot of security by virtue of design alone. Things like keyloggers and screenrecorders will not be able to intrude on your session barring vulnerability exploits. I’m not going to touch on the relative vulnerability risk of each environment since a) they’re all relatively new & b) I’ve never implemented Wayland myself

    With that being said, here’s what’s not protected by Wayland regardless of the chosen compositor: microphones, webcams, keyrings, and files.

    For microphones & webcams, any distro which rolls Pipewire in combination with Wayland will be sufficient to secure these. Pretty much all Wayland environments roll Pipewire so this is only important to consider if you’re running your own customized environment (be sure to disable any pre-existing PulseAudio daemon after setting up Pipewire to close this security hole)

    For keyrings, these are handled by your environment’s polkit implementation. Much like Wayland, there are several implementations of polkit and they’re all just about equally secure barring any potential vulnerabilities… Just make sure that you’re using an encrypted database (usually on by default) and that you have it configured to always relock & properly prompt for the unlock key.

    For file access, this is actually a core probelm with Linux as a whole – any unsandboxed application you run will be able to read any file that you can read. The solution is to use sandboxed applications whenever possible. The easiest way to achieve this is through using flathub/flatpak applications, since they will always list out and enforce their required permissions on a per-application basis. For non-flatkpak applications, you’ll need to use “jail” environments (e.g.: bubblejail, firejail) in order to artificially restrict application permissions by hand.

    kevincox,
    @kevincox@lemmy.ml avatar

    Things like keyloggers […] will not be able to intrude on your session

    This isn’t really true. Run libinput debug-events. In most distros users will have access to run this and keylog all input events.

    I use Wayland and love it, but keyloggers are not prevented on most common setups.

    TootSweet,

    All else being equal, less code and less dependencies is safer. The bigger the application and the more it tries to do, the larger its attack surface.

    (Again, all else being equal. DWM is probably smaller than Weston, but Weston doesn’t let just any old process log keypresses or take screenshots, so probably at least arguable to say that Weston is (qualifier, handwave, condition, clarification) “safer.”)

    EuroNutellaMan,
    @EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world avatar

    I see you post a lot about security so I just wanted to chime in and say that maybe just use what works well for you because there’s nothing inherently safe, only stuff that is easier to break and stuff that takes more time. The only real way to be safe is to be prudent with what you download and what you do on the internet.

    Pantherina,

    Hmm… yes for sure, but as I am already at a point where things just work, its interesting to deal with this

    haroldstork,

    Could you provide some criteria for what you’re looking for in the way of security? Wayland is far better for security than Xorg, but it’s hard to say how much it varies between wayland compositors. I can’t imagine it would matter too much, but depending on how much security you’re looking for, choosing more minimal software is probably better. Rust can be better for security but I’m not entirely sure how much can really get compromised through poor memory management in a window manager.

    BaalInvoker,

    Made in Rust is not synonym of safety. Every code is as safe as its programmer made it be.

    iopq,

    Most of security CVEs are related to memory bugs, so it’s relatively more safe vs. a certain type of exploits

    InEnduringGrowStrong,
    @InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works avatar

    This is both true and terrifying.

    Eezyville,
    @Eezyville@sh.itjust.works avatar

    It’s also as safe as the user allows. You can put in all the safety measures but that means nothing if the use disables them for convenience.

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